A terrible, thrumming vibration travelled through her legs as the waves slapped and hissed against the electrical junction box where Feril’s body had lain.
She waded through the water, slipping on the bank of diamond debris under her feet, then hauled the door open against the sucking weight of water and stumbled splashing up a dark, inclined corridor beyond. She checked the HandCannon as she went, thinking it felt wrong, and cursing when she dis-covered there was no magazine in it. She stuffed it into a pocket.
Another quaking burst of sound came from behind her and a great, dark fist of smoke pushed out from the chamber, pulsing along the surface of the ceiling above her.
The corridor rose; the water around her legs became shallower.
Cables hanging from the ceiling swung back and forth, making her fight her way through, crashing off walls and cable-runs and buzzing metal boxes. Smoke preceded her along the shad-owy corridor as she finally waded up some steps and out of the water.
She ducked under drooping, humming cables, through a haze of acrid smoke, a stink of burning insulation and a scrape of sparks as the broken end of a cable swung back and forth across the damp flagstones.
She straightened on the far side to see Breyguhn standing five metres in front of her, right wrist chained to the wall, her right hand gripping a pistol. She was bleeding from a head-wound. The thin yellow light made her look deathly pale.
Breyguhn pointed the gun at Sharrow. “He’s gone, Sharrow,” she said sadly. “Taken his silly sword and gone.” She shrugged. “Frightened the Gun was going to do something irresponsible…” Breyguhn smiled bleakly.
She took a step towards Sharrow, who retreated a step and then flinched as she backed into the hanging cables. The cable at her feet sparked and crackled.
“Taken his silly sword and gone…” Breyguhn said in a girlish, sing-song voice. She aimed the gun at Sharrow’s face. The chain squeaked.
Sharrow ducked as the gun fired; she grabbed the live cable and jammed the exposed end into the chain-track on the wall.
Breyguhn screamed. Her gun loosed off its remaining rounds into the wall as she shook, her wrist smoking.
When the gun stopped firing, Sharrow hauled the cable out of the chain-track.
Breyguhn collapsed like a heap of rags, only her still smoulder-ing wrist held upright against the wall by the chain.
Sharrow gagged on the smell of burned flesh as she stum-bled forward. She turned Breyguhn’s face to the light and felt for a pulse. Her half-sister’s eyes stared up the tunnel, motionless. Sharrow shook her head and dropped the other woman’s arm.
Another explosion from the chamber behind blew her off her feet and along the tunnel.
She started running.
There was another door where the chain-track disappeared; she ignored it and ran limping, head pounding, breath ragged, down the tunnel. It ended in a tall space lit from above-and from a downward slope in front-by grey daylight. It smelled rank and fetid and the stone floor was covered with straw. She saw large stalls on either side; harnesses and bridles and tall saddles hung on the walls. There were no animals in any of the stalls. The grey light from the slope in front of her came from another short, high-ceilinged tunnel.
She limped down it, under the barbed teeth of two enormous portcullises, out into the cold drizzle of the day.
She was standing on a weed-smothered slope that led from the foot of the Sea House’s towering walls down to the sand and gravel floor of the bay. The sea was a line in the distance, light-grey against dark. A broad stone ramp sloped away to the sand pools and gravel banks the retreated tide had revealed. The grey water piled and hummocked in the distance, out to sea. There was no land visible.
A large animal carrying a single rider was picking its way through the humped shoals of gravel beyond a stretch of sand dotted with shallow pools where the animal had left its hoofprints. As the rider glanced back, the wind lifted his riding cape and blew it out to one side.
She ran down the slope, skidding on the weed, and splashed into the first sandy pool. A sliver of sand-duped land was just visible in the distance round the side of the House’s dark walls.
She ran on a way, then stopped.
What was she doing? The bandamyion reared up and turned round, stepping delicately forward across the gravel shoal until it found the relative firmness of the sand again.
You idiot, she told herself. You’ve got an empty gun in your pocket. What the hell are you going to do with that? Throw it at him? You should have run the other way, round the walls to the outfall; you could have got the monowheel and chased the asshole on his stupid animal in that.
Geis brought the bandamyion trotting forward. He was about thirty metres away. He reined the beast in. It stood shaking its wide, tawny head. He leant over the saddle, staring at her.
“Satisfied, Sharrow?” he said. His voice sounded thin and reedy in the cold, salty wind. “Do you know what you’ve done?”
Geis was edging the bandamyion slowly closer, its heavy hooves splashing in the pools of water.
“But you’d ruin that, too, wouldn’t you, Sharrow?” Geis said, still advancing. “You’d wreck that plan like you’ve wrecker everything else, wouldn’t you?”
She just stood there. She wondered what else there was to do. Cold water seeped into her shoes.
“Do you?” Geis shouted.
She looked back at the Sea House. It was its usual massive self. If the Lazy Gun was still causing havoc somewhere inside it, at least it hadn’t yet decided to destroy the whole thing.
She looked back at Geis and shrugged.
“And I once thought I loved you,” Geis said, shaking his head. He said it so softly she hardly heard him.
Geis drew the jewel-encrusted sword from its saddle-sheath and switched it on; its edges were suddenly lined with pink fire. “I’m going to make you the mother of God, Sharrow,” Geis said, urging the bandamyion forward a pace or two.
She wasn’t sure she’d heard him right.
“Girmeyn,” Geis said. “Girmeyn, on Nachtel’s Ghost. He will be the Messiah; a new voice for the new age, a line written under all we’ve done in the last ten thousand years and a new hope for the next ten thousand.
“He’s mine. I had him raised; I held his life, all he was, contained in my hand,” Geis said, holding up the hand gripping the bandamyion’s reins. “I had him brought up, trained, educated. All that you destroyed in there today,” Geis said, nodding at the House behind. her, “all that was to be his birthright, my final gift to him. But you took it away from him. He’s on a Foundation asteroid now; one of mine. That’s where Girmeyn is, Sharrow, and he’s your son.”
Son? she thought.
The bandamyion trotted forward.
“Your son,” he shouted. “Yours and your thief friend! Taken out after you crashed on the Ghost; stored while my clinicians found a way to save it, then grown like a clone; only actually born ten years ago, but aged in the tank and fed the wisdom of ten millennia and a set of perfect, optimised stimuli by an AI devoted to the purpose; and all to my design. So he’s mine, perhaps more than he’s anybody’s. But biologically he’s yours, Sharrow. Have no doubt.”
Son? she thought. Girmeyn?
Who, me? she thought.
She could see the facets in the bandamyion’s dark eyes now, dull glisters in the grey light. She took a step back, then another. She really ought to have gone for the monowheel.
“I would make you the mother of the Messiah, the mother of God, and you’d spit on it, wouldn’t you, Sharrow?” Geis kicked the bandamyion’s sides. The spur terminals buzzed and the animal trotted, rolling its great head. She stepped back.